Page 868 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 9 April 2014
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some of the issues were in terms of their capacity to respond to the situation. This will help us with an understanding of what legislative changes might be required and help Assembly members identify if there are other issues that were in play. There is also the possibility that the Assembly may decide that there is further investigation required if the answers provided are not satisfactory. But the first and most important thing is to get the various pieces of information that are proposed through both Mr Corbell’s amendment and my amendments.
In summary, there is often commentary about the effectiveness or otherwise of the EPA. I suspect that much of the good work that the EPA do goes unnoticed. That is likely to be the case. If they do their job and do it well, these sorts of issues never come to the fore. So I want to acknowledge the considerable effort that is put in by the staff of the EPA. But in this case, we need to be clear what drove the actions, or perhaps the lack of action, from the EPA at the time this was going on and whether or not there were changes made by the EPA to remedy what appear to be poor internal processes. We need to be clear that the legislative changes that the minister is proposing will ensure that something like this does not happen again. We need to take this opportunity to acknowledge that the work of the EPA is essential, that they require the support of government in terms of resourcing and in terms of legislative power.
I thank Ms Lawder for bringing this matter before the Assembly today. It is important that we discuss it. I appreciate that the minister has been open-minded about what is needed from the government to respond to recent revelations. And I would like to acknowledge the work undertaken by Christopher Knaus, the journalist at the Canberra Times who has put this issue on the agenda. I appreciate that, whatever the actions or the explanations from those involved, it is important, and I think welcomed, that a journalist has gone to the effort of actually researching this sort of issue in such significant detail; bringing it into public discourse; and spending a considerable time perusing the documents and ensuring that matters like this do not simply get forgotten with the passage of time.
MS LAWDER (Brindabella) (4.15): I will close. I will speak to the amendments. I would like to thank Minister Corbell and Minister Rattenbury for their very strong interest in this matter, which, as I said earlier, reflects very strong interest from the community. However, I cannot help thinking that this amendment to the amendment and the original amendment significantly water down the original motion, which sought an inquiry by the ACT Auditor-General. The issue is not just the pollution itself, but whether we now have the correct structures in place for the EPA and other relevant government agencies to reassure the public that this management system breakdown will not occur again.
To put it crudely, this amendment asked those who failed to act in the first place to clean up their mess and then reassure us that everything is okay. As Mr Rattenbury so simply put it, the only person with no skin in the game here is actually the ACT Auditor-General. Earlier today, when we were speaking to a motion about racial discrimination, Minister Rattenbury accused the federal Attorney-General of a public retreat from earlier stated principles. I point out that it was Mr Rattenbury who first raised the suggestion of an Auditor-General investigation into this issue, and the
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